It’s a tragedy when a film is lost, any film. Neither a film’s initial production cost, star content, critical reception, box-office earnings, length or genre mitigates that motion picture’s loss as a cultural artefact, a historical record of time and place. And so unnerved I felt as a film archivist who’d been in my career, the last archives manager for RKO Studios, a stock footage sales librarian, the producer of a documentary on film preservation, a film inspector, and for the last 10 years, the manager of the LAC Still Archive, responsible for the safely archival re-housing, concise inventory and select scanning of thousands of legacy motion picture photos into the digital realm.
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